Ohio Solar Energy for Electricians

Sunday, May 16, 2010 2:59 AM
BY JOE HALLETT AND DAN GEARINO
Green energy is already here, with numerous companies big and small making names for themselves. Here's a look at a sampling of Ohio's clean-energy innovators:

Sunpower Inc.

An earthly power source for the vehicles that traverse outer space emanates from an old brick factory on Mill Street in Athens.

William T. Beale continues to adapt and perfect the Stirling engine for future energy-efficient uses in the home after already using it to cool vehicles such as satellites.

Looking around the factory on a visit late last year, Gov. Ted Strickland marveled "that something being developed and created here is going to be used by NASA in outer space." Pausing, Strickland contemplated the "why here" question.

"What about MIT? What about Harvard or Stanford? Why is this research happening here at Ohio University?"

Stroking the scruffy beard beneath his wire-rimmed glasses and ragged baseball cap, Beale didn't need to think before answering.

"Every 20 people who come around here say, 'What the hell are you doing in Athens, Ohio?' I say, 'Man, I was raised here.'"

At age 32, Beale arrived on the OU campus in 1960 to teach mechanical engineering. He began experimenting with an old invention: In 1816, Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, founded the concept of an engine powered by external heat rather than internal combustion. After borrowing $20,000 from his mother-in-law in 1974, Beale left the university to start his own company, Sunpower Inc., and take Stirling's invention to then-unforeseen heights.

He invented the free-piston Stirling engine and, over the past 36 years, Sunpower has received 48 American patents and 111 international ones for generators capable of taking any source of heat - solar, landfill gas, biomass, fossil fuel, or nuclear - and converting it to electricity. Sunpower has become a world leader in energy-efficient, environmentally friendly machines for power generation and cooling. The company expects to more than double its 73-employee work force.

Along with powering and cooling space vehicles and appliances, Beale sees Sunpower's engines eventually being mass-produced in Ohio factories, with capabilities such as moving solar energy from the nation's Southwestern deserts to Ohio. At 83 , he can be found most days in a cluttered lab of the Mill Street building, working with younger engineers and students.

"This is what I do instead of play golf."

Xunlight Corp.

Twenty-five years after leaving China to study at the University of Chicago, Xunming Deng and Liwei Xu are scraping the rust off Toledo's economy and repainting it green.

The husband-and-wife team - he's a physicist, she's a chemist - have transferred their lab research at the University of Toledo to the production of solar panels in an old factory on Nebraska Avenue that employs 100 in a green-energy venture called Xunlight Corp.

The company has patented the process and machinery to make a thin-film solar panel flexible enough to be rolled onto or integrated into a building's roof, transferring captured sunlight into electricity for home heating and cooling.

Along with First Solar in Perrysburg, the world's largest manufacturing facility of thin-film photovoltaic solar panels, and a University of Toledo incubator that connects research with business development, Xunlight has helped to cast the Toledo area as a national hub for solar-energy innovation.

"The fact that we might not be in a great solar zone in Ohio to use it to generate electricity doesn't negate the fact that we're a great state for the development of solar technologies and selling those technologies elsewhere," said Simon J. Tripp, senior director of Battelle's technology development consulting unit.

Indeed, Deng and Xu found the University of Toledo's business and technology incubation center hospitable for transferring their science into a commercially viable alternative energy product.

"It's important to get scientists and entrepreneurs in one place where they can bounce things off of each other," said Diane M. Miller, assistant director of the incubation center.

At its 122,000-square-foot factory, Xunlight's unique roll-to-roll photovoltaic manufacturing process coats thin sheets of stainless steel with silicon film that captures sunlight. The plant has the annual capacity to make panels that generate 25 megawatts of electricity enough for 5,000 homes.

Xunlight would not exist without taxpayer help, including a $5 million grant and $7 million loan from the state. It also has received $42.5million from venture capital funds. Xu, one of about 20 Xunlight employees with doctoral degrees, said the company has yet to turn a profit, "but hopefully this year."